beyond good and evil arendt, nietzsche and the aestheticization of political action[1]

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Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political ActionAuthor(s): Dana R. VillaSource: Political Theory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1992), pp. 274-308Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/192004Accessed: 30/08/2008 22:52

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BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action

DANA R. VILLA Amherst College

UNTIL RECENTLY, HANNAH ARENDT'S THEORY of political action has been colonized almost exclusively by champions of a dialogical, consensus-based model of politics. Habermas provides perhaps the best example of a "consensus" reading of Arendt, a reading which stresses her distinction between action and speech, on one hand, and work, labor, and instrumentality, on the other. For Habermas and many others, Arendt's theory of action starkly underlines the difference between a politics of dialogue, persuasion, and agreement and a politics of interests, strategy, and efficiency.1 Arendt's primary contribution to political theory, it is claimed, is her rescue of the intersubjective essence of political action - action as "acting together, acting in concert" - from the oblivion threatened by the technocratic usurpa- tion of the practical.2

The belated reception of Arendt's work in France has begun to call this reading into question. The influence of Arendt on such theorists as Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jean-Francois Lyotard (to name but a few) is unmistakable. Their work has helped draw attention to a less dialogue-centered Arendt. For example, Lyotard's work on the gap between political and cognitive judgment refers us to the "pagan" Arendt, the Arendt who is highly skeptical of a rationalized, theory-derivative politics.3 His polemical critique of consensus-oriented politics (in The Postmodern Con-

AUTHOR 'SNOTE: Versions of this essay werepresented at theAPSA meeting in San Francisco, 1990 and at the Political Philosophy Colloquium at Harvard. My thanks to FrederickDolan and Steve Macedo for organizing these events, as well as to the participants. This essay has particularly profited from comments by Bonnie Honig, Bob Gooding-Williams, Austin Sarat, George Kateb, and Tracy Strong, as well as the referees for PT.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 20 No. 2, May 1992 274-308 i 1992 Sage Publications, Inc.

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Villa / BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL 275

dition) refers us to Arendt's own fierce commitment to plurality and difference as essential conditions of political action.4 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, departing from the Arendtian theme of the withdrawal of the political in the modern age, have underlined the tension between an agonistic politics open to alterity and a rational, dialogical politics that subsumes it.5 They remind us that Arendt's primary project is to deconstruct the tradition's teleological model of action, a model that is still at work in the Habermasian conception of communicative action.6

I am generally sympathetic to this interpretive trend, as it seems more adequate to Arendt's theoretical ambition. A poststructuralist perspective on Arendt serves to remind us that her focus on the intersubjective nature of political action is, as it were, merely the first step in a larger project: the radical rethinking of the nature of action and the political. Indeed, Arendt theorizes action not only as essentially nonstrategic and noninstrumental but as essentially nonsovereign: the peculiar freedom of action cannot be cap- tured by philosophies of action that place autonomous agency at their center.7 Arendt decenters the subject in the political field in a manner parallel to Nietzsche's decentering of the moral subject. The result is a theory of action in which virtuosity, agonism, and theatricality dominate the more Aristotelian model of deliberating citizens, which Habermas sees as the center of Arendt's theory.8

While poststructuralist readings of Arendt help place her theory of political action in a new and different light, it would be a great mistake to begin reading her as a poststructuralist avant la lettre.9 This is not because she is "really" a neo-Aristotelian, as many, including Habermas, have argued. Nor is it because she is, in Seyla Benhabib's phrase, a "reluctant modernist."10 She is, as I hope to show, far more Nietzschean in her approach to the tradition and action than either of these characterizations allows. But it must also be pointed out, contra her more enthusiastic poststructuralist readers, that there are significant limits to Arendt's Nietzscheanism. Here, it seems to me, we reach the heart of the issue: Arendt's uniqueness, her distance from both Habermasian seriousness and Derridean/postmodem playfulness, can only be measured through a sustained investigation of the Nietzschean dimension, pro and contra, of her work.

The first section of this essay locates Arendt's theory of political action within the broad Nietzschean project of overcoming Platonism. Arendt was, of course, skeptical of Nietzsche's success on this score."1 Whatever we think of her assessment of Nietzsche's "inverted Platonism" (an assessment clearly influenced by Heidegger), we are nevertheless compelled to recog- nize the anti-Platonic impulse behind her theory of political action. Following

276 POLITICAL THEORY / May 1992

Nietzsche, Arendt views the Western tradition of political philosophy - the "Socratic tradition" - as deeply hostile to action and the contingency and plurality that characterize the realm of human affairs.'2 The Platonic/ metaphysical prejudice against appearance and becoming takes an explic- itly political form in the Platonic reinterpretation of action as a kind of making, a reinterpretation that aims at nothing less than an escape from politics altogether.'3

Nietzsche and Arendt combat the reductionist character of the teleological model of action, exposing the nihilistic consequences of denying meaning or value to the realm of action and appearances. Their strategies are remarkably similar: they respond to the Platonic instrumentalization of action and its degradation of the world of appearances by self-consciously aestheticizing action. This means that the standard categories for analyzing action (e.g., motives, goals, consequences) and the conception of agency that they pre- suppose are put aside: action is now seen in terms of performance. The performance model enables Arendt and Nietzsche to highlight the action- undermining character of the reified distinction between actor and act, agent and "effect." It also enables them to conceive action as self-contained, as immanently valuable in its greatness or beauty. Aestheticizing action re- deems its meaning, restores its innocence, and places it "beyond good and evil."

Arendt and Nietzsche's depictions of aestheticized, self-contained action, while structurally similar, are marked by important differences in the meta- phorics on which they are based. These differences, I argue, ultimately determine how we understand the "aestheticization of action," for while Arendt embraces agonism and virtuosity, hers is an aestheticism with a difference. Her idiosyncratic appropriation of Kant's third Critique, an appropriation which places great weight on the notions of "disinterestedness" and the sensus communis, should be read as a forceful critique of Nietzsche's aestheticism and its metaphysical and epistemological commitments (the will to power and perspectivism). As I argue in the second section of this essay, Arendt is unwilling to trade one reductionism (the Platonic instrumentalization of action) for another (the Nietzschean reduction of action to an expression of the will to power). Arendt invokes Kant in order to reassert the dialogical or deliberative moment as a necessary boundary, i.e., in order to tame the agon, to keep the play playful.'4 Arendtian plurality exceeds the consensus model; however, it is, in the last instance, importantly disanalog- ous with Nietzschean difference. She offers us a unique vision of an aesthetic politics, one built on a rejection of the antipolitical in Nietzsche, one keenly aware of the deformities inherent in the aestheticization of politics performed

Villa I BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL 277

by the German philosophical tradition from Schiller to Heidegger.'5 More- over, her critique of Nietzschean aestheticism alerts us to the reductionist tendencies present in certain strains of poststructuralism.

ANTI-PLATONISM AND AESTHETICISM INARENDTAND NIETZSCHE

An anti-metaphysical view of the world -yes, but an artistic one.

-Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1048

In The Human Condition, Arendt asserts thatplurality, the fact that "men, not man, live on earth and inhabit the world," is "specifically the condition of all political life."'6 Plurality is the hallmark of action that, unlike either labor or work, can only be carried on between men. As the conditio sine qua non of the "sharing of words and deeds," plurality makes possible the peculiar freedom of political action, a freedom that is essentially worldly, limited, and nonsovereign."7 Worldly because the freedom of political action is the freedom of a "plural We" engaged "in changing our common world."18 It is, as Arendt remarks, "the very opposite of 'inner freedom,' the inward space into which men may escape from external coercion and feel free."'9 Such philosophical freedom - the tenuous freedom of the will - "remains without outer manifestations and hence is by definition politically irrelevant."'

To be free and to act, then, are from Arendt's point of view, the same.21 The freedom of action is, however, an essentially limited freedom: it occurs in the world, that is, in the web of human relationships created by the fact of plurality.22 This has a number of consequences. First of all, it means that much of the freedom of action is found in its initiatory dimension, its character as beginning. "To act," she writes in The Human Condition, "in the most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin, to set something in motion."23 Through action, through speech and deeds in the public realm, the actor inserts himself "into the human world," disclosing himself and the world in the process.24 This disclosure, however, has a price. For while action is always a beginning, it is not a beginning over which the actor retains control. To act, to insert oneself into the human world, brings one face-to-face with the fact of plurality: the political actor "always moves among and in relation to other acting beings."25 The political actor is therefore "never merely a doer, but also and at the same time a sufferer."26 The freedom of political action is genuine, worldly, yet limited- its authenticity is marked by its distance from


the condition of sovereignty or autonomy. Qua political actors, we are anything but sovereign.27

Plurality, then, introduces an irreducible contingency to political action, a contingency that is, in many respects, the ground of action's peculiar freedom. Yet this contingency -what Arendt calls "action's futility, bound- lessness and uncertainty of outcome"281- gives rise to frustration with and, ultimately, hostility to action. Unable to accept that freedom could imply nonsovereignty, that action could have meaning precisely because of its "haphazardness," the Western tradition has repeatedly sought to find a substitute for action, to reinterpret it in a manner that would allow the beginner to retain control over what he started, to posit the end of action and realize its achievement.29 Plato, according to Arendt, saw the problem clearly: if the beginner was "to remain complete master of what he had begun," then action had to be recast in a way that would neutralize the effects of plurality and make the "ideal of uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership" conceivable in political terms.30 Plato achieves this theoretical inversion, this neutering of plurality and politics, by reinterpreting action as a kind of making or fabrication. The political actor (the philosopher-king), like the craftsman, "sees" the product that he wants to create before he acts: knowing and doing are separated. Action becomes simply the execution of the means to a preposited end.3" This reified separation of theory and practice thus issues in a "natural" hierarchy of ruler and ruled, of knower/ruler and executor/ subject.32

Even though the doctrine of ideas, the metaphysical and epistemological ground of Plato's analogy, has not survived, his substitution of making for acting has proved foundational for a tradition desirous of suppressing plurality and contingency. The persistence and success of "the transformation of action into a mode of making" is measured, according to Arendt, "by the whole terminology of political theory and political thought, which indeed makes it impossible to discuss these matters without using the categories of ends and means and thinking in terms of instrumentality."33 Any theory of political action that genuinely desires to overcome the Platonic hostility toward plurality and restore a sense of the intrinsic value of political action must, in Arendt's view, transcend the category of means and ends and focus, instead, on theorizing the performance of action itself. The teleological model of action that governs the tradition can be overcome only by articulating action in its self-containedness, that is, as energeia. And this means only by bracketing instrumentality.34

Action is, in Arendt's view, an end in itself. This is why Aristotle's distinction between poiesis and praxis, between activities whose meaning or


worth resides in the product they create or the end they achieve and activities whose value resides in the sheer performance of the activity itself (e.g., flute playing), is so important to her.35 Nevertheless (and this is something readers like Habermas fail to notice), Arendt insists that Aristotle did not go far enough in conceptualizing the peculiar self-containedness of action. Ulti- mately, the Aristotelian definition of praxis is instrumentalist, insofar as the meaning of action is inseparable from a process of teleological actualization: the life of action is distinctively human because only it attains the good.36 Arendt therefore turns the Aristotelian emphasis on action as ateleis against the protoinstrumentalism she detects in praxis. She pushes the emphasis on performance as far as it will go precisely because she is aware that even praxis does not escape an ultimate assimilation to poiesis.

Beyond the Aristotelian emphasis on end-constitutive deliberation among equals so familiar to readers of Arendt's theory of action, there is, then, an equally persistent stress on freedom as a kind of virtuosity, on the public realm as a kind of theater, and on the agonistic character of political action as a way of distinguishing or disclosing oneself.37 Typically, these two strands of Arendt's theory of action have been posed as altemative, indeed contra- dictory, models: on one hand, the unabashedly heroic or Greek conception of action presented in The Hwnan Condition; on the other hand, the deliberative, dialogical model that dominates her interpretation of modern political action (On Revolution).38 Yet I would like to suggest that an "aestheticist" reading of Arendt's theory of action enables us to see these as two moments in the theorization of self-contained action. Arendt's "structure of intentions," in other words, remains constant, despite changes in emphasis.

Arendt develops her most provocative analogies between action and the performing arts in her essay "What Is Freedom?" Searching for an image of freedom in the political realm that would capture its nonsovereign nature, Arendt gives us a (typically idiosyncratic) gloss on Machiavelli's notion of virtu:

Freedom as inherent in action is perhaps best illustrated by Machiavelli's concept of virtu, the excellence with which man answers the opportunities the world opens up before him in the guise of fortuna. Its meaning is best rendered by "virtuosity," that is, an excellence we attribute to the performing arts (as distinguished from the creative arts of making), where the accomplishment lies in the performance itself and not in the end product which outlasts the activity that brought it into existence and becomes independent of it. The virtuoso-ship of Machiavelli's virtu somehow reminds us, although Machiavelli hardly knew it, that the Greeks always used such metaphors of flute-playing, dancing, healing and seafaring to distinguish political from other activities, that is, that they drew their analogies from those arts in which virtuosity of performance is decisive.39


This passage is important because it indicates just how far Arendt is willing to go to identify the actuality and freedom of action with the performance itself. The chief reason why the performing arts have, in her opinion, "a strong affinity with politics" is that in neither case is the meaning "instrumental or objectifiable in character."40 That is to say, contra Plato, that the freedom and meaning of action are radically separate from the achievement (or nonachievement) of any end beyond the performance. Arendt puts the same thought in a slightly different way when she claims that "men are free - as distinguished from possessing the gift of freedom - as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same."4'

The notion that freedom is a kind of virtuosity displaces the teleological model of action in several ways. First, it makes contingency a structural part of the freedom of action: virtuosity is manifest only in terms of the opportunities provided by fortuna. As Arendt remarks in "What is Authority?": "Virtu is the response, summoned up by men, to the world, or rather to the constellation of fortuna in which the world opens up, presents and offers itself to him, to his virtu. There is no virtu without fortuna and no fortuna without virtu."42 To eliminate or marginalize contingency, as Plato desires to with the interpretation of action as making, succeeds only in covering over this essential dimension of freedom. Second, by focusing our attention on the performance of action, freedom as virtuosity makes the phenomenality of political action -the fact that deeds and words are to be seen and heard - central to our conception of it. The importance of the public realm is that it provides a "space of appearances," a "kind of theater where freedom appears."43 Political actors, like performing artists, "need the presence of others before whom they can appear"; both "need a publicly organized space for their "work" and both depend on others for the performance itself."" Third, the performance model underlines the fact that plurality is the fundamental condition of political action. Without other actors, no opportunity for the expression of virtu is possible; without an audience, action -words and deeds - fails to appear and its meaning is unredeemed. The failure to achieve phenomenal expression is, in Arendt's view, equivalent to the failure to achieve reality: "For us, appearance - something that is being seen and heard by others as well as ourselves -constitutes reality."45

If, as Arendt suggests, action is essentially performance and if freedom is essentially virtuosity, then the categories of means and ends, motives, and goals are of dubious value in rendering the phenomenon of political action. The aesthetic interpretation of action implies that the only appropriate criterion for judging action is greatness. Moral categories apply to everyday life: they provide necessary standards of judgment for determining appropri-


ate conduct under normal conditions. However, they cannot do justice to the performance of action in the public realm, for here we encounter a phenomenon whose very nature verges on the miraculous.' The Greeks were aware of the transcendent nature of action, and judged it accordingly:

Unlike human behavior-which the Greeks, like all civilized people, judged according to moral standards- action can be judged only by the criteria of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis.47

Arendt's point is that "greatness" alone applies to the performance itself. To judge action according to its motivation or achievement inevitably de- grades its autonomy, destroys "the specific meaning of each deed."'

Arendt's emphasis on "the shining glory of great deeds" is, obviously, far removed from the deliberative/dialogical model of political action. Her desire to preserve the autonomy of action from the incursion of instrumental modes of thought leads her to invoke the analogy of the performing arts, and this analogy - with its emphasis on virtuosity and greatness - yields a conception of political action as agon, as heroic.49 Her aesthetic reconceptualization of action thus places her closer to Nietzsche (and Machiavelli) than to Habermas. More specifically, her polemic against the tradition's tendency to make freedom a predicate of an autonomous subject, a disembodied will (a tendency which denies the worldly quality of freedom), resonates with Nietzsche's sustained attack on the moral and epistemological subject.

In The Genealogy of Morals (hereafter GM), Nietzsche questions the slavish tendency to take the actor out of the world by positing the "grammat- ical fiction" of a subject behind every deed.50 By separating the actor from his acts in this way, the "slave" or reactive man is able to maintain the belief that who we are is, finally, independent of our style of action, our virtu. For the slave, the belief that identity precedes and stands apart from action is immensely comforting: it enables the reactive man to see his impotence, his inability to act and distinguish himself, as a choice rather than a constitutive of who he is. According to Nietzsche, belief in the subject makes possible "for the majority of mortals, the weak and oppressed of every kind, the sublime self-deception that interprets weakness as freedom."5'

Against the "slavish illusion" of a subject of agency which stands outside the world, Nietzsche argues simply that "there is no such substratum; there is no 'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed-the deed is everything.",52 Arendt, in arguing for the interpretation of freedom as virtuosity and action as performance, is urging


us, like Nietzsche, to reject the "slavish" moralizing tendency to posit a reality behind appearances, to take the actor out of the world and separate him from what he can do.53 Freedom, according to Nietzsche and Arendt, is not found in the choice not to act, nor is identity something that precedes or is separable from action. Only the performing self knows freedom, and only through performance can an otherwise dispersed or fragmented self be gathered together and display its uniqueness. Men become who they are, as Nietzsche would say, through action and the achievement of a distinct style of action.54 Arendt makes a parallel point when she claims that men show who they are in virtuosic action.55

While Arendt's critique of the "traditional substitution of making for acting" reveals a great deal of the violence that this interpretation does to the phenomenon of political action, it is only when we turn to Nietzsche's unmasking of the moral subject in GM that we come to appreciate just how violent our moral epistemology is. For while Arendt's account highlights those dimensions of action that get covered over by the teleological model, Nietzsche provides a genealogy of the basic syntax that we impose on action, a syntax appropriated, he argues, for the purpose of eliminating difference and constraining agonistic action. Nietzsche sees the-reification of this syntax as originating in a slavish hostility to action even more primordial than the philosophical prejudice against the realm of human affairs cited by Arendt. By stressing just how reductive of plurality and difference the moral interpretation of action is, Nietzsche's analysis supports Arendt's view that we need a model of action that breaks decisively with the instrumental one. If, as Arendt argues, plurality is the origin and goal of agonistic political action, then it is essential to see how our grammar of action is always already at work in subverting the basic condition and primary achievement of action.

Nietzsche's suspicion regarding the subject not only reveals a hostility to plurality and action built into our very language but reveals how belief in this "fiction" underlies the basic Platonic/metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality.56 Overcoming the reified actor/act distinction would, therefore, not merely enable a more affirmative account of agonistic action but would be a central moment in overcoming the Platonic/Christian/ascetic devaluation of worldliness and appearance. This larger overcoming is impera- tive if the nihilistic dialectic initiated by Plato's institution of the appearance/ reality distinction is to be escaped (the Platonic valuation robs this world of meaning, yet is powerless to protect the transcendent grounds it posits from subsequent undermining by the same will to truth).

This, I think, is where Arendt's aestheticism draws closest to Nietzsche's. Both embrace aestheticism as a strategic response to the exhaustion of


meaning produced by the nihilistic logic that the Platonic valuation sets in motion. If, as Nietzsche suggests, we read the last 2,000 years as the story of "How the Real World at Last Became a Myth," of how we are left with only this world after belief in transcendent grounds withers, then the choice is between a positivistic/nihilistic embrace of "meaningless appearances" and an aestheticist revaluation of appearances as the privileged locus of meaning. Arendt and Nietzsche deploy the aesthetic against Plato, not out of mere skepticism regarding the existence of Truth or transcendent values (for both, the destruction of such ideals is an accomplishedfact of recent Western history)"7 but as a way of rescuing thepossibility of meaning in a nihilistic age.58

Nietzsche's undermining of the belief in a detached, autonomous ego and the moral interpretation of action that goes with it is thus of paramount importance to Arendt and, in many respects, sets the stage for her own reconceptualization of action. The moral/teleological interpretation of action must be overcome if we are to avoid the reduction of plurality and difference, on one hand, and that of meaning and appearance, on the other. But while the interpretation of freedom as sovereignty leads, in an obvious way, to the reduction of plurality, what is it about the distinction between actor and action - a distinction that, in its reified form, both Nietzsche and Arendt aim to overcome - that makes the moral interpretation so inimical to difference? What is it about the focus on motives and goals, intentions and consequences, and means and ends that is so hostile to action that we are compelled to aestheticize the phenomenon in order to save it? Nietzsche provides clues to these questions in the section from GM cited earlier, the most important being that the imposition of this distinction alters the perspective from which we view the phenomenon of action. We now view action, Nietzsche insists, from the standpoint of those for whom agonistic action was the greatest evil.

Nietzsche's argument takes the following form. From the point of view of the active man -one who creates his own values as an exercise in self- affirmation, who is capable of great action, and who can distinguish himself and lives to do so -the distinction between the "subject" and his effects makes no sense. The energies or forces of the noble man are, as Deleuze reminds us, always acted: such a man is his deeds and does not conceive himself otherwise."9 The reactive man - the slave, in Nietzsche's terminology - needs to make this distinction in order to create the illusion of freedom in impotence. But he also needs this distinction in order to seduce the active man into believing that he is responsible for his actions because he could always have acted differently. The active man could, qua agent, choose not to act in an affirmative, agonistic manner; indeed, he could adopt a code of behavior based on the slavish denial of action. From the point of view of the


slave, action is the original sin. It symbolizes a form of life whose strength is manifest in its deeds, a form of life that is constantly individualizing and distinguishing itself through action.60 The slave revolt in morality is, in Nietzsche's eyes, precisely a revolt against the life of action: the transvalua- tion of values that it achieves is predicated on the goodness of abstaining from action.6

The trick is to get the agonistic actor to accept this radical change in perspective, to view his action as blameworthy rather than self-affirming. This, Nietzsche argues, is accomplished by means of the fiction of the subject, the fiction of a force separated from what it can do. Taken in by the tautological doubling of the deed that occurs in language (e.g., "the lightning flashed") that the slave presses on him, the master succumbs to the idea that "the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb."62 He accepts a moral epistemology that makes "the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey" and so becomes ashamed of his uniqueness and distinction. The active man willingly denies his agonistic spirit so that he too might be "good" in the slavish sense of the word.63 Thus the strategic employment of a reified distinction between actor and act, subject and "effects," overcomes the "pathos of distance" between two radically different types. Through reflection, the vocabulary of justification, and shame, the forces of the active type are rendered reactive.' No longer evaluated in terms of style or virtuosity, action is brought down to size through constant monitoring of its motives and consequences.

The moral interpretation of action, then, reveals a hostility toward individualizing or great action in its very structure. It inserts a justificatory gap between actor and deed, insuring that motives and consequences take prece- dence over the performance of action as such. At this stage, the stage of "bad conscience," the energies required for agonistic action are turned inward, channeled into the activity of self-surveillance and self-punishment.65 The spontaneous, initiatory quality of action is increasingly smothered through the universalization of the standpoint of the one who does not act. The moralization of action (the story of which Nietzsche tells in GM) results in an antiagonistic attitude: the essential thing is to adjust one's behavior to the needs of the herd.66 Our virtues, "namely, public spirit, benevolence, consideration, industriousness, moderation, modesty, indulgence and pity" are the virtues of a tame animal, an animal who does not act, an animal "easy to get along with and useful to the herd."6'

Arendt's agreement with Nietzsche on the general tendency promoted by the moral interpretation of action (and its teleological counterpart) is clearly evident in her aestheticist treatment of action and in her sardonic admission


that her "Greek" theory of virtuosic action is "no doubt ... highly individu- alistic, as we would say today."68 The trajectory of her analysis of modernity in The Hwnan Condition attests, moreover, to her agreement with the Nietzschean thesis that action and difference are fatally undermined by moral interpretation, which elevates the perspective of utility and which culminates in the celebration of behavior over action.69 From her emphasis on homo faber's inability to grasp the meaning of action to her conclusion that man as the animal laborans is increasingly incapable of performing it, Arendt's analysis presumes that Nietzsche's genealogy is essentially "correct," that the deep hostility to action manifest in the moral interpretation works itself out in modernity's reification of instrumentality, life, and material comfort.70

Arendt and Nietzsche are in similarly close agreement in their aestheticist rejection of truth as a meaningful or relevant standard for action in the world. As with the rejection of a hypostatized split between actor and act, motive here is supplied by the essentially reductionist character of moral interpretation, by its bogus claim to universality. As Nehamas has pointed out, one main reason for the triumph of the moral point of view on action is that the reification of the subject occurs in language itself.71 This enables the moral interpretation to present itself, plausibly, not as one interpretive vocabulary but rather as a representation or translation of the structure of the world and action in it.' Much of the power of the ascetic valuation derives precisely from its denial of perspective, partiality, interests. It sets up the game of deriving actions from general principles, a game which Lyotard reminds us is as old as the West itself (its greatest monument is Plato's Republic)."

Nietzsche, of course, denies the possibility of eliminating perspective, of coming up with a vocabulary that mirrors the structure of a reality beyond interpretation: "There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing.' "74 This position frees us from the despotism of the ascetic will to power/ will to truth and affirms the essential pluralism of the world. And this, moreover, makes possible a stronger, life-affirming kind of objectivity, an objectivity quite distant from the contemplative ideal of a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject": "the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity,' be."'75

Arendt follows Nietzsche in rejecting a will to truth that seeks to get behind appearances and beyond perspective. The moral prejudice at work in the ascetic/Platonist valuation of truth is, simply, that it is worth more than appearance.7'6 As outlined earlier, no assumption is more damaging to the world of politics. Seen from the viewpoint of politics, truth has an undeniably "despotic character": it


peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very essence of political life. The modes of thought and communication that deal with truth, if seen from a political perspective, are necessarily domineering; they don't take into account other people's opinions, and taking these into account is the hallmark of all strictly political thinking.77

The coercive character of truth, an aspect that Arendt refers to again and again in a variety of contexts, leads her to adopt a perspectivist view of the world and to identify opinion as the stuff of political life.78 Only by affirming the essentially perspectival character of doxa can the world qua world appear and the agon (now framed as debate) continue. As she writes in The Human Condition, "the reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised."79 Arendt's politics of opinion and her antipathy to truth can thus be seen as a specifically political version of Nietzsche's perspectivism.se

There is much, then, in Arendt's theory of agonistic political action that builds on Nietzsche's aestheticist struggle against Platonism. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, the parallels and continuities discussed so far do not touch on Arendt and Nietzsche's deepest connection: their turn to aestheticism as a way out of the nihilism which stretches from Plato to the present.8' If, as Michel Haar notes, nihilism begins with the assertion that "this world is worth nothing and nothing in it is worth anything" and proceeds to invent a "true world" possessing all the attributes lacking in this one (unity, stability, identity, truth, goodness, and so forth), then "the division of the two worlds, the feat undertaken by Plato, constitutes the nihilistic act par excellence."82 It is so because the division denies meaning or value to the appearances themselves: only insofar as these are signs of some (nonapparent) reality are they granted significance.83 Western man early gets into the habit of making meaning dependent on some realm of essence beyond existence. An inevita- ble corollary of the will to truth or essence is the dialectic of enlightenment, the process by which all such "transcendent" grounds are dissolved in a corrosive skepticism: the true world becomes a fable. The central value of our culture - truth - drives us to ceaseless unmasking, to the destruction of life-affirming illusions and horizons, to the "truth that there is no truth" - God is dead.84 The irony, as Tracy Strong observes, is that this discovery does not liberate us from the sense that we must have truth in order to have meaning, that meaning is somehow inextricably tied to truth or the universal.'s We continue to search for what we know does not exist, confirming our growing sense of meaninglessness; worse, we come to be at home in this exhaustion of meaning.


Nietzsche's aestheticism -his championing of art against truth, his affirmation of illusion and appearance, and his conviction that we need art to save us from truth - is obviously incomprehensible outside this context. My argument here is that Arendt's aesthetic approach to action is a parallel response to the same world historical phenomenon, the self-devaluation of the highest values, the collapse of tradition and authority.86 The realm of appearances - whether construed broadly as in the Nietzschean aestheticization of the world or narrowly as in the Arendtian aestheticization of the political -holds the promise of meaning freed from the will to truth, from the nihilism implicit in all teleology, whether of Nature, God, or Man.87 The aesthetic attitude toward existence propounded by Nietzsche and the aestheticization of political action proposed by Arendt have as their raison d'etre the redemption of a world rendered valueless by the collapse of absolutes and authority. Only by living "superficially" -as artists, as political actors, as glorifiers of appearance -do we escape the tragic wisdom of Silenus invoked by Nietzsche at the start of The Birth of Tragedy and by Arendt at the close of On Revolution.88 The glorification of appearance that takes place in art and self-contained action endows the world with a meaning that it otherwise lacks: both activities make the world beautiful; both escape the reduction of meaning that characterizes modernity.89

TAMING THE AGON: DIFFERENCE AND PLURALITY, PERSPECTIVSM AND JUDGMENT

The common element connecting art and politics is that they are both phenomenon of the public world.

-Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture"

It has been suggested that Arendt aestheticizes action as a way of overcoming its Platonic instrumentalization; that the performance-oriented, agonistic dimension of the resulting theory of action is essential to the preservation of plurality; that this conception of action owes much to Nietzsche's anti-Platonic, "immoralist" aestheticization of action; and, finally, that she and Nietzsche are one in their celebration of a nonsovereign, decentered freedom of action "beyond good and evil." When viewed in such a light, Arendt's theory appears far indeed from what Habermas presents in his consensus reading. But this raises the question of whether Arendt's anti- Platonism leads her, like Nietzsche, into an uncritical endorsement of ago-


nistic subjectivity. Can she be unaware of the dangers and distortions that an unrestricted agonism invites, distortions which threaten to undermine the very conditions of political action (plurality, equality, commonality)? More- over, does not her Nietzschean emphasis on the instrumentalizing and reductive tendencies of the moral interpretation lead her to marginalize the ethical moment in political action?90

Arendt is, of course, aware of the dangers of an excessive emphasis on the "fiercely agonal spirit" behind all genuine political action. In a previously unpublished manuscript, "Philosophy and Politics," she notes how this spirit constantly threatened to overwhelm the polis, to splinter it through centrifu- gal force.9' For this and the reasons mentioned earlier, she broadens the Nietzschean focus on the agonistic quality of action by reasserting the deliberative element present in both action and judgment. This move on her part may seem a capitulation, an abandonment of an ill-advised aestheticization of action through theatrical metaphors, and a return to the sound common sense embedded in the Aristotelian notions of praxis and phronesis. I would like to stress, however, that Arendt's modification of her aestheticized agonism does not employ "external" measures: the appeal she makes is not to reason or dialogue but to taste.92 Her theory of political judgment limits an excessive agonism not by abandoning the aestheticization of action but by completing it; hence her highly idiosyncratic appropriation of Kant's third Critique, an appropriation which enables her to preserve plurality and politics from the creeping subjectivism of Nietzsche's purely agonistic model.

As we shall see, while Arendt's revised version of agonistic politics places her at a distance from consensus theorists like Habermas, it is also at variance with those who, following Nietzsche, tend to view discourse as war, as out and out agon (Deleuze, Lyotard, and Foucault, at various moments).93 But here, it might be objected that it is simply wrongheaded to accuse Nietzsche of promoting an overly agonistic, masculine model of subjectivity, one more intent on self-display and self-composition than on being open to otherness. After all, the whole point of Nietzsche's archaeology of the moral, responsible subject in The Genealogy of Morals is to reveal the hidden coercions and violence that underlie the creation of any such centered subjectivity.9 Con- temporary appropriations of GM(e.g., Horkheimer and Adorno's in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Foucault's in Discipline and Punish) have stressed the violence, paranoia, and pathology that accompany the constitution of the self-identical subject.95 Against such an essentially deformed subjectivity, a subject that would prefer any amount of self-inflicted pain, even death, to the relaxation of its all too dearly bought boundaries, Nietzsche, it is claimed,


deploys a dissolvent notion of aesthetic experience, one that halts the unend- ing process of self-violation and self-mortification that is the ascetic ideal.

In this interpretation, increasingly dominant thanks to poststructuralism, Nietzsche stands as the great subverter of what Jochen Schulte-Sasse has called the "agonistic individuality of modern subjectivity."' Contra Habermas's reading, Nietzsche does not simply advocate the dissolution of ego boundaries, the "destruction of the principium individuationis," but rather proposes a model of the subject as, in Sloterdijk's words, "something radical, cybernetic, eccentric, and Dionysic, as a site of sensibility within the ruling cycle of forces, as a point of alertness for the modulation of impersonal antagonisms, as a process of self-healing for primordial pain."97 Such a subjectivity, with its relaxed view of identity and its openness to otherness, would no longer "enter into communicative interactions as contests," in the manner of agonistic agents whose sole goal is "boosting their identities."98 Instead, it would "give up the security of all local identifications," defortify itself, and cease viewing the repression of alterity as central to its continued preservation.99

This reading of Nietzsche would place The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals in opposition to The Human Condition: Nietzsche does not promote agonism; he subverts it. This is, of course, the other side of poststructuralism/postmodernism, its "underhanded Christian" side, as Nietzsche would say. It encourages us to believe that Nietzsche saw little of positive value arising from the long, slow process of self-mortification by which man gives himself a will and which GM, prefiguring Freud, identifies with the development of culture. It is a position, moreover, that asks us to envisage a Nietzsche who would object to Habermasian rational discourse on the grounds that the "ideal speech situation" is overly agonistic.

It is important to take this reading seriously, if only because the critique of autonomy is such a central element in both Nietzsche and Arendt.'" Does the Nietzschean version of this critique result in the rejection of anything resembling an agonistic subjectivity? If we stick to GM, it is clear that Nietzsche's decentering of the subject, his unmasking of the supposedly "free" agent, is not an indictment of subjectivity tout court, nor can it be said that the positive image of subjectivity contained therein is antiagonistic. Pace Foucault, subjectification is not always or merely subjugation for Nietzsche.'0' If it were, then Nietzsche would be in the position of grounding the "joy in action" in the absence of a reflexive relation to self, in sheer instinctual behavior. However, the occasional embarrassing remarks about the "blond beast" aside, the thrust of Nietzsche's analysis is that man only


becomes an interesting animal as a result of this self-violence. "Breeding an animal with the right to make promises," the "tremendous labor" of the "morality of mores," does not bring forth one fruit.l"f There is the slavish will, to be sure, the will turned against itself, the will that is an instrument of self-surveillance, self-punishment, and adjustment to the herd. But there is also what Nietzsche calls "the sovereign individual," the "ripest fruit," the man in whom the process of discipline and interiorization has yielded a will strong enough to liberate itself from the morality of custom, from morality as such.'03 He is responsible, this "master of a free will," but only to himself. He is freed from the constraints imposed by motives and goals and the moral criteria appropriate to them: his discipline is not in need of such props. Nietzsche's positive image of subjectivity is that of an individual who is "autonomous and supramoral," whose discipline is such that he "becomes who he is" by the imposition of a certain style on the fragments that provide the raw material for his self. Such an individual masters himself, overcomes himself, in the activity of self-composition. This self-overcoming, which is also a self-creation, constitutes, in Nietzsche's view, genuine freedom:

For what is freedom? That one has the will to self-responsibility. That one preserves the distance that divides us. That one has become more indifferent to hardship, toil, privation, even to life. That one is ready to sacrifice men to one's cause, oneself not excepted. Freedom means that the manly instincts that delight in war and victory have gained mystery over the other instinct for "happiness." The man who has becomefree- and how much more the mind that has become free - spums the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.104

Nietzsche's formulation of the virtuosic freedom of such a subject casts the antiagonistic reading in doubt. Moreover, it inevitably colors the way we view Arendt's parallel conception of virtuosic agency. If free action by definition transcends the categories of motives and goals, what possible meaning can it have apart from the aesthetic enjoyment, the feeling of power, which such self-conscious mastery, such display of one's own virtuosity, produces? Where "the deed is everything," it is abundantly clear that what matters is the style of action and not its origin or goal. Nietzsche's self- consciously aesthetic approach to action raises the question of how such "autonomous" action can ever amount to more than the form-giving "process of subduing" to which he refers.'05 His celebration of the artist's will as a paradigmatic instance of such overcoming, of creative/appropriative interpretation, leads us to ask Arendt what prevents her conception of action from developing into a similar subjectivism? How does one reconcile the imper-


ative of greatness (the distinctive quality of "aesthetic" action) with the preservation of genuine plurality?

Nietzsche's aestheticization of action culminates, then, in an overstate- ment of the world- and self-creative potential of great, agonistic and/or artistic action. "Active" forces are "spontaneous, aggressive, expansive form-giving"; they are constantly engaged in the process of imposing "new interpretations and directions" on phenomena.'06 The "will to power" is the attempt by each interpreting force to assert its hegemony. The world, in this view, exists only as a "sign chain" awaiting investment. As Nietzsche puts it, "Whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation."'07 Devoid of any intrinsic meaning, identity, or structure, the world and self offer unlimited opportunities for the Apollonian imposition of form, the affirmative creation of value. Through his virtuoso deployment of new tropes, the "artist" creates both new ways of seeing the world and new compositions of self."'0

Another way of stating the deficiencies of Nietzsche's aestheticism is to say that it divides performer and audience, rendering the latter virtually superfluous. What does the creator of new values, fresh illusions, care for the spectator? Like Nietzsche, he recognizes his own untimeliness. Insofar as the audience does have a place in the Nietzschean paradigm, it is in the contemporary form of interpretivism: the audience is seen as an aggregate of agonistic interpreters or critics, each seeking to impose his reading on any performance. " From this standpoint, the abolition of the "true world" really does do away with the apparent one as well: meaning and structure derive solely from the subjective positings of the actor or audience. In The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche does not hesitate to link the unmasking of the "true world" to the unmasking of the apparent one.'10 There can be, as a result, no meaningful talk of a shared world of appearances. The dissolution of any transcendent or transcendental ground of appearances implies that these have value or meaning strictly as a function of "perspective seeing." Nietzschean perspectivism denies appearance its own reality: belief in such a reality is only a metaphysical hangover.

Arendt tums to Kant's Critique of Judgment precisely to save virtuoso political action and the world of appearances from the subjectivism implicit in Nietzsche's aestheticist anti-Platonism. The primary threat arises from the cult of the actor or artist, and it is for this reason that Arendt reminds us that "truly political activities . . . acting and speaking, cannot be performed at all

292 POLMCAL THEORY / May 1992

without the presence of others, without the public, without the space constituted by the many.""11 Any theory of political action that adopts the strategy of aestheticization as a way of avoiding reductionism will fail unless it includes a theory of judgment that displaces the locus of meaning creation from the virtuoso actor and/or the isolated spectator. In this regard, Ronald Beiner is absolutely right to note that "the concem with the judging spectator is simply the extension of Arendt's definition of politics in terms of virtuosity or performance."112

How, then, does the appropriation of the third Critique enable Arendt to escape the aporias inherent in the aestheticization of action and the agonistic conception of politics? How can Kantian aesthetics be used to reassert the intersubjective nature of the phenomenon that Arendt wants to preserve without reducing them to a function of simple agreement? How, finally, can a theory of aesthetic judgment tame without neutering an agonistic conception of political action?

In her essay "The Crisis in Culture," Arendt compares works of art to the "products" of action, namely, words and deeds. What they share, she says, is "the quality that they are in need of some public space where they can appear and be seen; they can fulfill their own being, which is appearance, only in a world which is common to all.""'3 Kant's aesthetic theory -which is particularly attuned to the public character of beauty, offering "an analytic of the beautiful from the viewpoint of the judging spectator" gives us access to this reality in a way foreclosed by Nietzsche's reductionist view of appearance.'14 For Nietzsche, appearances are merely artifacts, errors, illusions created for the sake of life.115 As a result, one ought not discuss the problem of the beautiful except in terms of the needs of the creator and the forces expressed in his creation. To approach appearances/the beautiful from the contemplative standpoint, as Kantian aesthetics does, is one more sign of the decadence of the ascetic ideal. What Nietzsche specifically holds against Kant, namely, that he, "like all philosophers, instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem from the point of view of the artist (the creator) considered art and the beautiful purely from the point of view of the spectator" (GM, III, 6) is the primary reason why Arendt holds that his aesthetic theory has political relevance."6

How, precisely, does the Kantian "contemplative" approach avoid a reduction of appearance a la Nietzsche? In the third Critique, Kant goes out of his way to establish the specificity of aestheticjudgments and their objects. The broad distinction that he draws between determinative and reflective judgments, between judgments for which "the universal (the rule, the principle, the law)" is given and judgments in which only the particular is given


and "the universal has to be found," is intended to open a gap between the activities of judging an object as an instance of something and judging it in its specificity, qua representation.'17 Aesthetic judgments are reflective precisely because they concern representations as representations rather than as representative of something, as instances of a given concept. The extremely strong distinction that Kant draws between aesthetic judgment, the judgment of whether something is pleasing or displeasing to us as representation, and cognitive judgment, the judgment of the objective qualities of a perception, is meant to underline the very different faces that a phenomenon presents to us given the different attitudes with which we approach it. In the aesthetic attitude, we perform a kind of epoche by which the natural attitude, with its concern for and interest in things, is bracketed. As Kant says in section 2 of the third Critique, "When the question is whether something is beautiful, we do not want to know whether we, or anyone else are, or even could be, concerned with the real existence of the thing, but rather what estimate we form of it on contemplation.""18

Kant's extremely careful isolation of aesthetic experience and judgment enables us, contra Nietzsche, to conceive a way of judging appearances which gives them their due, which does not reduce them to one more expression of an overflowing life."t9 His spectatorial approach, albeit exag- gerated and rigidly formalistic, opens up a sphere removed from the more pressing interests of life, a sphere where, in Arendt's version, "we are confronted with things which exist independently of all utilitarian and functional references, and whose quality remains always the same."'20 How- ever anemic Kant's conception of the aesthetic appears from a Nietzschean perspective, it has the merit, according to Arendt, of drawing our attention to the fact that "only works of art are made for the sole purpose of appearance."'121 Aesthetic objects are those "whose very essence is to appear and be beautiful."t122 "The proper criteria by which to judge appearances is beauty," not because beauty is edifying but because it lets the appearances shine forth as appearances.

"Saving the appearances," then, presumes something like the contemplative attitude that Nietzsche scorned. From Kant's perspective, genuine aesthetic experience and judgment presupposed the achievement of a disinterested attitude, a bracketing of interest."2 Nevertheless, one would be hard-pressed to see how such an attitude could be translated or transferred to that other realm of appearances, the political realm. Arendt, however, claims that something like the aesthetic attitude is indeed necessary if we are to be open for that world. In "The Crisis in Culture," she glosses Kant's fundamental line of reasoning:


The proper criterion by which to judge appearances is beauty.... But in order to become aware of appearances we first must be free to establish a certain distance between ourselves and the object, and the more important the sheer appearance of a thing is, the more distance it requires for its proper appreciation. This distance cannot arise unless we are in a position to forget ourselves, the cares and interests and ures of our lives, so that we will not seize what we admire but let it be in its appearance.

Arendt's intention here is fairly clear. To do justice to political action, to redeem the meaning potentially disclosed by words and deeds in the public realm, the judging spectator must be able to assume an attitude similar to Kant's uninteressiertes Wohlgefallen. Without it, nonsovereign political action would lose its revelatory capacity: action would be judged in accordance with a variety of material or moral interests; worse, it might be seen as the mere manifestation of power. To appreciate the "play of the game" that characterizes a genuinely agonistic politics, the audience must be "released from life's necessity" and in a position to bracket such interests. Only then will they be "free for the world."'25 This is why Kant's formulation of aesthetic or taste judgments is an appropriate model for political judgment, for "taste judges the world in its appearance and in its worldliness.... Neither the life interests of the individual nor the moral interests of the self are involved here. For judgments of taste, the world is the primary thing, not men, neither man's life nor his self."'26

While the question of the nature and degree of "abstraction from interest" appropriate to the political realm is a perplexing one, it is important to see the thrust of Arendt's reliance on Kant. Agonistic, virtuoso political action threatens to fragment the polis. One way of avoiding this is to cultivate an ethos whereby actors are more committed to playing the game than to winning.'27 Another equally important way of taming the agon is to insist that political judgment -the meaning that we draw from words and deeds - operates at a certain distance from the myriad interests of the audience.'28 "Disinterestedness" in raising men above the pressing needs of life and the self is essential to the appreciation of the performance character of action and so to the intrinsic value of politics itself.

But while it may be admitted that disinterestedness is crucial to preventing a lapse into the politics of ideology, interests, or need, it seems ironic that Arendt would urge the adoption of a contemplative attitude toward political action. After all, The Human Condition identifies the contemplative (Pla- tonic) impulse as specifically antipolitical.'29 Arendt, however, is careful to distinguish between the contemplative attitude that characterizes theoria and the "objectivity" that characterizes the man of practical judgment. The latter arises not from achieving agreement with oneself (Socrates) but from being


able, in Kant's words, to "think in the place of everybody else."'130 Having an "enlarged mentality," what Arendt calls "the ability to see things not only from one's own point of view but in the perspective of all those who happen to be present," presumes both distance and imagination."3' Imagination - which Kant describes as the free play of the mind's power of representation - enables us to put ourselves "in the place of any other man" and thereby to abstract from "the limitations which contingently attach to our own judgment."'32 Aesthetic - and political -judgment achieves its disinterested character not through a complete withdrawal from the world but by being representative, a point that Arendt stresses in "Truth and Politics":

Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question of neither empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people's standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think were I in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusion, my opinion. 3

The representative thinking made possible by disinterested judgment is Arendt's Kantian version of Nietzsche's perspectival objectivity, the objectivity born of using "more" and "different" eyes to judge/interpret a thing.'34 There is, however, an obvious and crucial difference between perspectives represented through the free play of imagination and the "perspective seeing" that Nietzsche describes. For Nietzsche, the ability to view the world aesthet- ically presupposes liberation from any residual sense that the link between signifier and signified is in any way nonarbitrary. Having "more" and "different" eyes simply means the ability to relativize all accepted meanings, to dissolve their apparent solidity in the free play of signifiers.135 In Kant and Arendt, on the other hand, the free play of the imagination, the capacity for representative thought, has the effect of focusing the judging agent's attention on the publicly available aspects of the representation.'36 The representative nature of judgment enables the transcendence of "individual limitations" and "subjective private conditions," thereby freeing us for the purely public aspect of the phenomenon.

The difference between genealogical "objectivity" and representative judgment, between the kind of aesthetic distance endorsed by Nietzsche and that endorsed by Kant and Arendt, is summed up by the contrast between


Nietzsche's trope of "seeing things from another planet" and the Kantian/ Arendtian appeal to "common sense," the sensus communis. 17 Nietzschean aestheticism, in the form of perspectivism, has the effect of either placing one beyond any community of interpretation (the genealogical standpoint) or denying that a viable "background consensus" exists, thereby robbing the public realm of its fundamental epistemological precondition. There can be no arena of common discourse, no genuinely public space, when the "death of God" leads to the advent of Weber's "warring gods."138 Lyotard expresses a similar thought when he links the discovery of an irreducible plurality of incommensurable language games to the decline of the legitimizing metanarratives of modernity.'39 In such a situation, judgment and interpretation are inevitably aestheticized: we are left, in Nietzsche's phrase, with the "yay and nay of the palate."1"'

For Kant, the significance and implications of aesthetic distance are quite opposite. As noted previously, he is struck by the public character of the beautiful, despite the nonobjective quality of aesthetic experience."4' The impartiality of detached aesthetic judgment, while not pretending to truth, guarantees that the object or ground of aesthetic satisfaction will be commu- nicable. This in turn reveals a quality of taste as judgment, which is obscured by Nietzsche, and our own subjectivist notion of taste. Taste judgments of the disinterested sort are characterized by a peculiar claim: the pure judgment of taste "requires the agreement of everyone, and he who describes anything as beautiful claims that everyone ought to give approval to the object in question and describe it as beautiful."'42 The communicability of taste judgments leads Kant to posit the existence of a common sense, a common "feeling for the world." Indeed, Kant describes taste itself as "a kind of sensus communis."'43

The aesthetic distance achieved by representative thought thus points to the "grounding" of judging insight in common sense, a point that Arendt emphasizes. "Common sense," she writes, "discloses to us the nature of the world insofar as it is a common world; we owe to it the fact that our strictly private and "subjective" five senses and their sensory data can adjust themselves to a nonsubjective and "objective" world which we have in common and share with others."'" The significance of Kant's theory of taste judgment for politics is that it shows how a nonfoundationalist theory of judgment can in fact serve to strengthen rather than undermine our sense of a shared world of appearances. Kant's analysis of taste judgment reveals how, in Arendt's words, "judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass.",145 It does so by highlighting the public-directed claim implicit in all pure judgments of taste, by showing


how the expression of approval or disapproval, satisfaction or dissatisfaction appeals to the common sense of one's judging peers. In matters of taste, one "expects agreement from everybody else."'" Oriented toward agreement, relying on common sense, taste judgment emerges, contra Nietzsche, as the activity through which the public world presences itself as appearance, as the activity through which a community "decides how this world, independently of its utility and all our vital interests in it, is to look and sound, what we will see and what men will hear in it."147

Kant's theory of judgment thus opens a space between the false objectiv- ism of Plato (political judgment as a kind of episteme, as determinative judgment) and the subjectivism that accompanies Nietzsche's endorsement of perspectival valuation. Taste judgments are valid, but their "specific validity" is to be understood precisely in opposition to the "objective universal validity" that marks cognitive or practical judgments in the Kantian sense. As Arendt says, "its claims to validity can never extend further than the others in whose place the judging person has put himself for his considerations."148 Taste judgments are crucially dependent on perspective, the "it appears to me," on "the simple fact that each person occupies a place of his own from which he looks upon and judges the world."'49 Nevertheless, they constantly refer us to a world of appearances "common to all its inhabitants." Kant's notion of taste judgment provides the perfect model for political judgment, in Arendt's opinion, because it preserves appearance and perspective without abolishing the world.

We can sum up the achievement of Kant's theory of judgment by saying that it removes the spectre of the subjectivism of perspectivism of taste, yet without recourse to objective or cognitive grounds of validation. Lacking an objective principle, taste judgments are necessarily difficult, and where their validity is questioned, it can be redeemed only by persuasive means. As Arendt says in "The Crisis in Culture": taste judgments (unlike demonstrable facts or truths demonstrated by argument) "share with political opinions that they are persuasive; the judging person - as Kant says quite beautifully -can only 'woo the consent of everyone else' in the hope of coming to an agreement with him eventually."'50

Taste judgments are, in a word, redeemed deliberatively. Kant's conception of aesthetic judgment -departing from the exchange of viewpoints necessary for representative thinking and culminating in the persuasive exchange that accompanies the rendering of each judgment-is thus, for Arendt, political through and through.'5' It requires an ongoing process of exchange and deliberation, one "without criteria," as Lyotard would say.'52


This is yet another reason why Kantian taste judgment is the appropriate model for Arendt's account of political judgment, the "receptive side" of virtuoso action. It reasserts the intersubjective nature of both appearances and judgment while severing the links between the common or public and the universal. Our capacity for judgment rests on our feeling for the world, and this requires neither a transcendental ground for appearances nor univer- sally valid criteria of argumentative rationality. Practical questions emphat- ically do not admit of truth.'53 Yet political judgment seen as a kind of taste judgment nevertheless helps to tame the agon by reintroducing the connection between plurality and deliberation, by showing how the activity of judgment can, potentially, reveal to an audience what they have in common in the process of articulating their differences. And what they have in common, contra Aristotle and contemporary communitarians, are not purposes per se but the world. Debate, not consensus, constitutes the essence of political life, according to Arendt.'54 The conception of taste judgment proposed by Kant reopens the space of deliberation threatened by an overly agonistic aestheticization of action but in such a way that consensus and agreement are not the telos of action and judgment but, at best, a kind of regulative ideal.

The turn to Kant thus enables Arendt to avoid the antipolitical tendencies encountered in the actor-centered version of agonistic action. The meaning- creative capacity of nonsovereign action becomes importantly dependent on the audience, conceived as a group of deliberating agents exercising their capacity for judgment. The judgment of appearances or the meaning of action is seen by Arendt as predicated on a twofold "death of the author": the actor does not create meaning as the artist does a work, nor can the audience redeem the meaning of action through judgment unless the individuals who constitute it are able to forget themselves. This is not to say that Arendt's conception of political action and judgment extinguishes the self; rather, it is to say that self-coherence is achieved through a process of self-disclosure that is importantly decentered for both actor and judge, for the judging spectator is also engaged in the "sharing of words and deeds" in his capacity as a deliberating agent. As Arendt reminds us, "By his manner of judging, the person discloses to an extent also himself, what kind of person he is, and this disclosure, which is involuntary, gains in validity to the degree that it has liberated itself from merely individual idiosyncrasies."'55

The agon is tamed, then, not by retreating from the aestheticization of action but by following its anti-Platonic impulse through to the end. The "completion" of the theory of action by a Kant-inspired theory of judgment retains the focus on action as something heroic or extraordinary, as beyond


good and evil. It does so, however, by shifting the emphasis from world- and self-creation to the world-illuminating power of "great" words and deeds, to the beauty of such action. As a public phenomenon, the beautiful can only be confirmed in its being by an audience animated by a care for the world. The difference between Arendt's aestheticization of politics and Nietzsche's aestheticization of life is nowhere clearer than in the connection that Arendt draws between greatness and beauty in "The Crisis in Culture":

Generally speaking, culture indicates that the public realm, which is rendered politically secure by men of action, offers its space of display to those things whose essence it is to appear and to be beautiful. In other words, culture indicates that art and politics, their conflicts and tensions notwithstanding, are interrelated and even mutually dependent. Seen against the background of political experiences and of activities which, if left to themselves, come and go without leaving any trace in the world, beauty is the manifestation of imperishability. The fleeting greatness of word and deed can endure to the extent that beauty is bestowed upon it. Without the beauty, that is, the radiant glory in which potential immortality is made manifest in the human world, all human life would be futile and no greatness could endure. 156

Arendtian aestheticism, an aestheticism predicated on a love of the world and which admires great action because it possesses a beauty that illuminates the world, is critically different from Nietzschean aestheticism, the aestheticism of the artist. A persistent theme in Arendt's writing, one parallel to her emphasis on the tension between philosophy and politics, concerns the conflict between art and politics.'57 This conflict does not emerge out of the phenomenology of art versus that of political action; as we have seen, Arendt thinks both are importantly similar. Rather, the conflict centers on the mentality of the artist versus that of the political actor. The artist is, according to Arendt, a species of homo faber, who characteristically views the world in terms of means and ends. He is unable to conceive praxis independently of poiesis: the work always retains priority over the activity itself. The result is that performance is denigrated, action misconceived.

Nietzsche, of course, has even less use for homo faber than Arendt, who takes pains to voice her criticism not against making as such but against the universalization of a particular attitude. Nevertheless, if we take an Arendtian perspective, it is clear that Nietzsche, the artist-philosopher, must be counted among those who "fall into the common error of regarding the state or government as a work of art," as an expression of a form-giving will to power.158 The Republic stands as the initiator of the state as "collective masterpiece," as artwork, trope. The fact that Plato launched this metaphor in terms of what Lacoue-Labarthe calls a "mimetology," while Nietzsche


repudiates again and again all metaphors of correspondence or adequation, does not alter their fundamental agreement: both regard action not as essentially performance but as making.`59 Poiesis has a radically different conno- tation for Nietzsche, to be sure, but the activity of self-fashioning and self-overcoming does not overtum the Platonic paradigm so much as bring it to closure. Nietzsche may explode the notion of telos in its classical sense, but the model of the work retains its significance. Thus despite the importance of his anti-Platonism to the project of deconstructing the tradition's model of action, his contribution to the thinking of plurality and difference in apolitical way is subject to a crucial limitation. Thought essentially in terms of an "aesthetics of existence," in terms of a project of self-fashioning freed from any telos, the positively valorized notion of difference proposed by Nietzsche remains poetic. Like the activity of the artist, it "must be isolated from the public, must be sheltered and concealed from it" if it is to achieve adequate expression."O The poetic, ultimately antitheatrical framework assumed by Nietzsche prohibits the Arendtian thought that under certain very specific conditions, it is precisely the public realm which is constituted by plurality and which enables the fullest, most articulated expression of difference.

CONCLUSION

Arendt resists the Habermasian temptation to seek quasi-transcendental standards of agreement in a "polytheistic" disillusioned age. However, it is important to realize that her appeal to a Kantian notion of taste and the sensus communis is not tantamount to an endorsement of the Aristotelian view of political community and judgment (her comments linking taste judgments to phronesis notwithstanding)."6' Arendt's Kantian, aestheticizing turn has, unsurprisingly, confused commentators, who note the highly attenuated character of community and the depoliticized notion of judgment in Kant.'62 Arendt chooses Kantian formalism over Aristotelian concreteness because, while she wants to focus on the shared world of appearance that is the public realm, she has no desire whatever to frame "what we have in common" in terms of purposes or ends. In this regard, the problem with the Aristotelian notion of koinonia, as defined in book 3 of the Politics, is that it creates not a stage for action but a vehicle for teleological fulfillment.'63 Arendt's appeal to the sensus communis self-consciously avoids the overly substantive, local character of koinonia or Sittlichkeit. At the same time, it denies the false universalism of moralitat. Arendt's theory of judgment points not to the determinancy of phronesis, with its emphasis on context and local practices,


but to "the free reflexive discovery of rules in light of indeterminate, transcendent ideas of community."'164

The critique of Aristotelian/communitarian thinking is also applicable to the kind of postmodern relativism that we find in a thinker like Lyotard. Like Arendt, Lyotard's conception of judgment is a curious mixture of Nietzschean, Aristotelian, and Kantian elements.165 However, the postmodern "incredulity towards metanarratives" serves not only to deny the possibility of any overarching metadiscourse that might render diverse language games commensurable but to deny the possibility of a public space of discourse, at least insofar as this space claims, implicitly, to synthesize perspectives and distance interests. For Lyotard, discourse is essentially fragmented: "All we can do is gaze in wonderment at the diversity of discursive species, just as we do at the diversity of plant or animal species."'166 It is also irreducibly interested: "to speak is to fight, in the general sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics."167 Given these assumptions, it is not surprising that Lyotard feels that Kant has left our ability to judge "hanging," as it were, and turns to the will to power as an explanation of this faculty.'68 What we find in Lyotard is the false Nietzschean dichotomy between a universal, metaphysically grounded metadiscourse and a fragmented, postmetaphysical discursive realm in which "public" discourse/judgment reflects either local habit or the agonistic ability to create new moves, impose new interpretations, generate new criteria -all in the name of the will to power.'69 Arendt's appeal to taste judgment and a shared feeling for the world may be immensely problematic, but it does serve to underline the falseness of this dichotomy.

One may grant that Arendt's aestheticism avoids the trope of the fiction du politique, universalism, and postmodem pluralism, yet still feel that her "solution" is of dubious relevance to our situation. True, there is a distance and alienation built into the Kantian idea of a community of taste that may make the Arendtian response to Enlightenment universalism more palatable to a postmodem sensibility than the overt Aristotelianism of a Maclntyre or a Gadamer. Nevertheless, the "withering away of common sense" in the modern and postmodern ages would appear to relegate Arendt's modification of Nietzschean aestheticism to the status of a rearguard action. The fragmen- tation of contemporary life renders the idea of a "common feeling for the world" more paradoxical, and possibly less viable, than a recovery of ethos or the legislation of a proceduralist rationality.

The simple answer to this objection is that Arendt completely agrees. Her work stands not only as a comprehensive rethinking of the nature and meaning of political action but as an extended mediation on how the energies


of modernity have worked to dissipate our feeling for the world, to alienate us from the world. The last part of The Human Condition equates modernity with world alienation: the reduction of Being to process, the subjectification of the real, and finally, the triumph of a laboring mentality all work to alienate man not from himself but from the world."? "Worldliness," presupposed by the sensus communis, is not a distinguishing characteristic of the animal laborans. Similarly, Arendt would entirely agree with the postmodernist who questions the possibility of circumscribing a particular realm of phenomena in a world where boundaries are increasingly blurred. In her analysis of "the rise of the social" in the modern age, Arendt identifies this blurring as the central movement of modernity.17' Her work departs from the strongest possible conviction that our reality is one in which stable boundaries and distinctions have been dissolved and rendered virtually impossible.

The postmodernist will object that Arendtian aestheticism, unlike Nietzsche's, mourns the loss of the world as an articulated, bounded whole. Nietzschean aestheticism is an affirmation of the Dionysian capacity to destroy fixed identities, to dissolve Apollonian stampings into flux. Post- modern theory affirms this aestheticism, exaggerating the immanent tendencies of postmodern reality in the pursuit of an active (i.e., creative) nihilism: it has no time for guilty nostalgia. Arendtian aestheticism, in contrast, stakes its hopes entirely on the rethematization of certain ontological dimensions of human experience (action, the public world, and self), which this blurring obscures, denatures, and makes increasingly difficult to articulate. The fetishistic quality of her distinction making, her Kantian finickiness in delimiting the political: these attest to a deeply rooted desire to preserve the possibility of meaning created by political action and redeemed by political judgment.172

NOTES

1. Jurgen Habermas, "Hannah Arendt on the Concept of Power" in Philosophical- Political Profiles, translated by Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983). Richard Bernstein and Seyla Benhabib give similarly dialogical readings.

2. Jurgen Habermas, "Technology and Science as Ideology" in Towards a Rational Society, translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1970), 96.

3. Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, translated by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Cf. also Habermas's contrary position in Legitimation Crisis, translated by Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1975), 110.


4. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), esp. xxv, 66.

5. Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Rejouer le Politique (Paris: Galilee, 1981) and Le Retrait du Politique (Paris: Galil6e, 1983). For a discussion of the Arendtian inspiration, see Nancy Fraser, "The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Decon- structing the Political?" in New German Critique 33 (1984): 127-54.

6. Habermas would, of course, dispute this claim because he defines the communicative concept of action as the antithesis of the teleological concept. See his "Hannah Arendt on the Concept of Power."

This is perhaps a good place to note the limits of this essay. As stated, I am concerned with Arendt's theory of action and neglected aspects thereof. Within this interpretive frame, I pass over some important elements, such as Arendt's thoughts on narrative and its contribution to the structuration of action. This element has been addressed by Benhabib (see note 10) and also by Bernard Stevens in "Action et narrativite chez Paul Ricoeur et Hannah Arendt," in Etudes Phenomenologiques 1 (1985): 93-110. I also do not attempt a comprehensive interpretation of Arendt's political thought, a project that would involve consideration of her concrete historical analyses (e.g., The Origins of Totalitarianism) and her more general philosophical reflections in The Life of the Mind.

7. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1977), 151ff. I deal with this issue here and in my book, Rethinking the Political: Arendt, Heidegger and PoliticalAction, forthcoming. See also B. Honig, "Arendt, Identity and Difference," Political Theory 16 (1988): 77-98.

8. See Habermas, "Hannah Arendt." For a full discussion of Arendt's deconstruction of the concept of praxis, see D. Villa, Arendt, Heidegger and PoliticalAction, chap. 1-2.

9. Honig, I think, errs a bit in this direction. 10. Habermas, "Hannah Arendt"; Seyla Benhabib, "The Redemptive Power of Narrative,"

Social Research 57 (1990): 167-68. Arendt as neo-Aristotelian is an interpretation that I take great exception to (see note 7). Benhabib's characterization, on the other hand, underplays the strong Heideggerian current in Arendt's thought, her antimodernism. See D. Villa, Arend4 Heidegger and PoliticalAction; also George Kateb,HannahArendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), chap. 5.

1 1. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 17-40. 12. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 16. 13. Arendt, Human Condition, 220ff. 14. Hannah Arendt, "Philosophy and Politics,"SocialResearch57 (1990): 73ff. Here, Arendt

notes the tendency of the agon to get out of control, cf. p. 82. 15. On the topic of aestheticizing politics, see Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and

Politics, translated by Chris Turner (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990); Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). The question of Arendt's critique of Heidegger is treated at length in chapter 6 of my book.

16. Arendt, Human Condition, 7. 17. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 163ff. 18. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 2, 200. 19. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 146. 20. Ibid.


21. Ibid., 153. 22. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 201. 23. Arendt, Human Condition, 177. 24. Ibid., 176ff. 25. Ibid., 195. 26. Ibid., 190. 27. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 163; Human Condition, 235. 28. Arendt, Human Condition, 195. 29. Ibid., 222: "Escape from the frailty of human affairs into the solidity of quiet and order

has so much to recommend it that the greater part of political philosophy since Plato could easily be interpreted as attempts to escape action and politics."

30. Ibid., 222,234; alsoBetween Past and Future, 157: "Our philosophical tradition is almost unanimous in holding that freedom begins where men have left the realm of political life inhabited by the many."

31. Arendt, Human Condition, 235. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 229. 34. See Villa,A rend4 Heidegger and Political Action, chap. 1. 35. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1097a, 1176b; also Arendt, Human Condition,

206-207. 36. See Villa, Arend4 Heidegger and Political Action, chap 1. 37. Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" in Between Past and Future; also Human Condition, chap. 4. 38. Kateb, to whose excellent presentation of Arendt's theory of action I am much indebted,

makes precisely this distinction. 39. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 153. 40. Ibid., 154. 41. Ibid., 153. 42. Ibid., 137. 43. Ibid., 155. 44. Ibid. 45. Arendt, Human Condition, 57. 46. Ibid., 197. 47. Ibid., 205. 48. Ibid., 206. 49. Ibid., pp. 41, 42. 50. Nietzsche, GM, I, 13. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. This formulation is from Deleuze. 54. See Nehamas, Nietzsche, chap. 6. 55. Arendt, Human Condition, chap. 4. 56. In The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche cites the "rude fetishism" of language as the source

of the belief in the self as substance/subject, as a unity detached from and prior to its actions, effects and thoughts. Language "sees everywhere deed and doer.. . believes in will as cause in general ... believes in the ego as being, in the ego as substance. .. projects its belief in the ego substance onto all things -only thus does it create the concept 'thing.' . . . It is only from the conception 'ego' that there follows, derivatively, the conceptof 'being'." See Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1979), 38.


57. Arendt, "Tradition and the Modem Age," in Between Past and Future; Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1968), pt. 1, "European Nihilism."

58. It is important, in this context, to note Arendt's well-known aversion to philosophies of history in the Hegelian, Nietzschean, or Heideggerian mode, in which the events of human history are a surface appearance driven by an "inner logic" (the unfolding of Geist, the growth of nihilism, or the withdrawal of Being). This said, it is nevertheless clear that Arendt views the Western tradition of philosophy and political thought as driven by a kind of inner logic, namely, the playing out of its structural possibilities. See her essay, "Tradition and the Modem Age." My concern with Arendt's revaluation of appearances departs from the Arendtian thesis concerning the closure of the tradition, a theme that she shares not only with Nietzsche but Heidegger and Derrida as well.

59. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 120. See also GM, I, 10. 60. Nietzsche, GM, III, 18. 61. Cf. Deleuze,Nietzsche and Philosophy, 121: "The evil one is the one who acts, who does

not hold himself back from acting, who does not therefore consider action from the point of view of consequences that it will have for third parties. And the one who is good is now the one who holds himself back from acting: he is good just because he refers all actions to the standpoint of the one who does not act, to the standpoint of the one who experiences the consequences, or better still to the more subtle standpoint of a divine third party who scrutinizes the intentions of the one who acts."

62. Nietzsche, GM, I, 13. 63. Ibid., III, 13. Nehamas calls this inducement of shame "the central purpose of slave

morality." See Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 126.

64. As Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy, "Understanding kills action." 65. Nietzsche, GM, II, 16. 66. Ibid., 1, 12. 67. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 199. 68. Arendt, Human Condition, 194. 69. Ibid., 43. 70. Cf. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 225. 71. Nehamas, Nietzsche, 121. 72. As Nietzsche remarks, one distinguishing characteristic of morality is that it "admits no

other interpretation, no other goal; it rejects, denies, affirms, and functions solely from the point of view of its interpretation (and has there ever been a system of interpretation more thoroughly thought through?)." GM, III, 23.

73. Lyotard, Just Gaming, 23-25. 74. Deleuze, Nietzsche, 3. 75. Nietzsche, GM, III, 12. 76. See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 34. 77. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 241. 78. In this regard, see "Philosophy and Politics"; see also "Truth and Politics," in Between

Past and Future and On Revolution, 268-79; "On Humanity in Dark Times," in Men in Dark Times.

79. Arendt, Human Condition, 57. 80. The specifically political character of Arendt's view is treated shortly. 81. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 3-4.


82. Michel Haar, "Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language," in The New Nietzsche, edited by David B. Allison (New York: Dell, 1980), 14.

83. Alphonso Lingis, "The Will to Power," in The New Nietzsche, 38. See also Arendt's discussion of Kant's prejudice in favor of the thing in itself in Life of the Mind, vol. 1, 24.

84. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1974), 125.

85. Tracy Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1975), 77.

86. See Arendt, "Tradition and the Modern Age" and "What Is Authority?" 87. Nietzsche's view that Man takes the structural place of God is elaborated by Heidegger

in "The Age of the World-Picture." Arendt's interpretation of modernity is importantly colored by the resultant conception of "humanism" as a metaphysical position. See D. Villa, Arendt; Heidegger and PoliticalAction, chap. 5.

88. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 29; Arendt, On Revolution, 281. 89. Arendt, Human Condition, 154-57. 90. See Kateb, Hannah Arendt, chap. 1. 91. Arendt, "Philosophy and Politics," 82. 92. For Habermas, Nietzsche's appeal to taste judgment is tantamount to sheer irrationalism.

See Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, translated by Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 127.

93. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 10; Michel Foucault,Power/Knowledge, edited by Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 93-108, 131-33; Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 7482.

94. As Nietzsche exclaims in GM, 11, 3: "Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over the affects, the whole somber thing called reflection, all these prerogatives and showpieces of man: how dearly they have been bought! How much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all 'good things'!"

95. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1988), and "The Concept of Enlightenment"; Michel Foucault, Discipline andPunish, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977).

96. In foreword to P. Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, translated by Jamie Owen Daniel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), x.

97. Ibid., 82. 98. Ibid., xxi. 99. Ibid., xxii. 100. Cf. note 6. 101. This is Dew's formulation. See Logics of Disintegration, 160. 102. Nietzsche, GM, 11, 2. Also, Beyond Good andEvil, 188. 103. Ibid. Cf. Deleuze, Nietzsche, 137: "The product of culture is not the man who obeys

the law, but the sovereign and legislative individual who defines himself by power over himself, over destiny, over the law: the free, the light, the irresponsible. "

104. Nietzsche, Twilight, 92, emphases in original. Cf. also Nietzsche's famous description of Goethe, 102-103.

105. Nietzsche, GM, II, 12. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid., emphasis in original. 108. Nehamas emphasizes this aspect in his Nietzsche: Life as Literature.


109. Cf. Richard Rorty's notion of the "strong textualist" in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 151-54.

110. Nietzsche, Twilight, 40: "We have abolished the true world: what world is left? the apparent world perhaps? ... But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!" Commenting on this passage in a different context (Introduction, 1-10, The Life of the Mind), Arendt agrees with the judgment that the distinction between sensory and supersensory has indeed disappeared. My point is that Arendt's concept of appearance does not reduce to the "merely sensory." See also Heidegger's commentary in hisNietzsche, vol. 1, "The Will to Power as Art," translated by David Ferrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 201-10.

111. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 217. 112. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 104. 113. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 218. 114. Ibid., 219. 115. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 24. 116. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 219. 117. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by J. H. Barnard (New York: Hafner,

1951), 15. 118. Ibid., 42, 43. 119. Nietzsche, Twilight, 71, 72. 120. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 210. 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. Ibid. 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid., 222. 127. See Kateb, HannahArendt, chap. 1. 128. Where it does not, one risks the politics of terror. See Arendt's Hegel-inspired analysis

in On Revolution. 129. Arendt, Human Condition, chap. 1. 130. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 241. 131. Ibid. 132. Kant, Critique, 136. 133. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 241. 134. Nietzsche, GM, III, 12. 135. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy and History"; also Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign

and Play," in Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278-95.

136. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 136. 137. Nietzsche, GM, III, 11; also "On Truth and Lie," in Philosophy and Truth, edited by

Donald Breazeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), 79ff. 138. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber, edited by Gerth and Mills

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 152-53. 139. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 26; also Just Gaming, 58. 140. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. 141. Kant, Critique of Judgment, sec. 20.


142. Ibid., 74. 143. Ibid., sec. 40. 144. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 221. 145. Ibid. Cf. Beiner, KantLectures, 119: "In matters of 'taste' I never judge only for myself,

for the act of judging always implies a commitment to communicate my judgment." 146. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 221. 147. Ibid., 222. 148. Ibid., 221. 149. Ibid., 222. 150. Ibid. 151. Ibid., 221-22. 152. Lyotard, Just Gaming, 16; cf., however, 14, where Lyotard denies the possibility of a

sensus communis in what he calls "modernity," tying taste judgments to both the premodern and the universal.

153. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, 110. 154. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 241. 155. Ibid., 227. 156. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 218. In this regard, see also Beiner's statements

regarding the significance of judgment in this context, Kant Lectures, 151ff.: "Judging is not simply a capacity of political beings.... It actually comes to serve an ontological function.... That is, judgment has the function of anchoring man in a world that would otherwise be without meaning and existential reality: a world unjudged would have no human import for us." See also 155: "If the being of politics is indeed appearance ... a public space of judgment is needed to render the world of appearances more durable- to confirm its being, as it were."

157. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 216-18. 158. Ibid., 153-54. Cf. GM, II, 17. 159. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, 66. 160. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 217. The phrase "aesthetics of existence" is one

employed by Foucault and refers to a project of self-fashioning exempted from the rule of a telos. See Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Random House, 1985), 89-93.

161. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 221. 162. R. Bernstein, Beiner, Gadamer, and D. Ingram have all noted this tension. 163. See Villa, Arendt, Heidegger and Political Action, chaps 1. and 2 for a discussion of

Arendt's appropriation and critique of Aristotle. 164. David Ingram, "The Postmodern Kantianism of Arendt and Lyotard," 52. 165. Lyotard, Just Gaming, 26-27. 166. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 26. 167. Ibid., 10. 168. Lyotard, Just Gaming, 17. 169. Ibid., passim. 170. Arendt, Human Condition, chap. 6. 171. Ibid., chap. 2. 172. See Kateb,HannahArendt, chap. 1. Cf. Beiner, "Interpretive Essay," in KantLectures, 152.

Dana R. Villa teaches political theory at Amherst College. He is author of Rethinking the Political: Arendt, Heidegger and Political Action (forthcoming).

beyond good and evil arendt, nietzsche and the aestheticization of political action[1]

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